This specification relates generally to information retrieval, and particularly to inferring social affinity based on interactions with search results.
Search engines identify resources (e.g., images, audio, video, Web pages, text, documents) that are relevant to a user's needs and present information about the resources in a manner that is useful to the user. For example, a search engine returns a set of search results in response to a user submitted query. A user may give more weight to search results that are associated with reviews, opinions, or other content associated with the user's social graph (e.g., contacts of the user).